I strongly endorse Johannes’ research approach. I’ve had 6 meetings with him, and have read/watched a decent chunk of his posts and YT vids. I think the project is very unlikely to work, but that’s true of all projects I know of, and this one seems at least better than almost all of them. (Reality doesn’t grade on a curve.)
Still, I really hope funders would consider funding the person instead of the project, since I think Johannes’ potential will be severely stifled unless he has the opportunity to go “oops! I guess I ought to be doing something else instead”as soon as he discovers some intractable bottleneck wrt his current project. He’s literally the person I have the most confidence in when it comes to swiftly changing path to whatever he thinks is optimal, and it would be a real shame if funding gave him an incentive to not notice reasons to pivot. (For more on this, see e.g. Steve’s post.)
I realize my endorsement doesn’t carry much weight for people who don’t know me, and I don’t have much general clout here, but if you’re curious here’s my EA forum profile and twitter. On LW, I’m mostly these users {this, 1, 2, 3, 4}. Some other things which I hope will nudge you to take my endorsement a bit more seriously:
I’ve been working full-time on AI alignment since early 2022.
I rarely post about my work, however, since I’m not trying to “contribute”—I’m trying to do.
EA has been my top life-priority since 2014 (I was 21).
I’ve read the Sequences in their entirety at least once. (Low bar, but worth mentioning.)
I have no academic or professional background because I’m financially secure with disability money. This means I can spend 100% of my time following my own sense of what’s optimal for me without having to take orders or produce impressive/legible artifacts.
I think Johannes will be much more effective if he has the same freedom, and is not tied to any particular project. I really doubt anyone other than him will be better able to evaluate what the optimal use of his time is.
Edit: I should mention that Johannes hasn’t prompted me to say any of this. I took notice of him due to the candor of his posts and reached out by myself a few months ago.
I absolutely agree that it makes more sense to fund the person (or team) rather than the project. I think that it makes sense to evaluate a person’s current best idea, or top few ideas when trying to decide whether they are worth funding.
Ideally, yes, I think it’d be great if the funders explicitly gave the person permission to pivot so long as their goal of making aligned AI remained the same.
Maybe a funder would feel better about this if they had the option to reevaluate funding the researcher after a significant pivot?
I strongly endorse Johannes’ research approach. I’ve had 6 meetings with him, and have read/watched a decent chunk of his posts and YT vids. I think the project is very unlikely to work, but that’s true of all projects I know of, and this one seems at least better than almost all of them. (Reality doesn’t grade on a curve.)
Still, I really hope funders would consider funding the person instead of the project, since I think Johannes’ potential will be severely stifled unless he has the opportunity to go “oops! I guess I ought to be doing something else instead” as soon as he discovers some intractable bottleneck wrt his current project. He’s literally the person I have the most confidence in when it comes to swiftly changing path to whatever he thinks is optimal, and it would be a real shame if funding gave him an incentive to not notice reasons to pivot. (For more on this, see e.g. Steve’s post.)
I realize my endorsement doesn’t carry much weight for people who don’t know me, and I don’t have much general clout here, but if you’re curious here’s my EA forum profile and twitter. On LW, I’m mostly these users {this, 1, 2, 3, 4}. Some other things which I hope will nudge you to take my endorsement a bit more seriously:
I’ve been working full-time on AI alignment since early 2022.
I rarely post about my work, however, since I’m not trying to “contribute”—I’m trying to do.
EA has been my top life-priority since 2014 (I was 21).
I’ve read the Sequences in their entirety at least once. (Low bar, but worth mentioning.)
I have no academic or professional background because I’m financially secure with disability money. This means I can spend 100% of my time following my own sense of what’s optimal for me without having to take orders or produce impressive/legible artifacts.
I think Johannes will be much more effective if he has the same freedom, and is not tied to any particular project. I really doubt anyone other than him will be better able to evaluate what the optimal use of his time is.
Edit: I should mention that Johannes hasn’t prompted me to say any of this. I took notice of him due to the candor of his posts and reached out by myself a few months ago.
I absolutely agree that it makes more sense to fund the person (or team) rather than the project. I think that it makes sense to evaluate a person’s current best idea, or top few ideas when trying to decide whether they are worth funding.
Ideally, yes, I think it’d be great if the funders explicitly gave the person permission to pivot so long as their goal of making aligned AI remained the same.
Maybe a funder would feel better about this if they had the option to reevaluate funding the researcher after a significant pivot?